Cleopatra: A Life (38 page)

Having fended off the assailants, Antony returned to the prow. Head bowed, he stared listlessly out to sea, the hero of Philippi, the new Dionysus, reduced to a great brooding hulk, the powerful arms and shoulders startlingly still. The cruise south was a bitter one, infected by mutual anxieties and private losses. It was also quiet. Antony spent three days alone, “either in anger with Cleopatra, or wishing not to upbraid her.” While it may have been forged of desperation, the plan had at one
time seemed a sensible one. Antony could not now escape the impression that he had deserted his men. They had remained steadfast while kings, senators, officers, had abandoned him. He had left them in the lurch, to find himself in an untenable position with Cleopatra. The outcome of the battle of Actium remained unclear, as it would for several days, but he understood the implications of what he had done and how it appeared. A Roman commander was meant to stare down defeat, to persist regardless of all debilitating odds. And history was entirely palpable to Mark Antony; in Rome he lived grandly in a house decorated by ninety bronze rams captured at sea. (They were Pompey’s.) He understood what glory had just slipped, forever, through his fingers.

After three days Cleopatra put in for water and supplies at Taenarum, the southernmost point of the Peloponnesian peninsula. (Fittingly, it was the cape where Hercules was believed to have searched for the entrance to the underworld.) There two of her servants, Iras the hairdresser and Charmion the lady-in-waiting, urged a reconciliation. With some coaxing, the two women persuaded Antony and Cleopatra to speak, eventually even “to eat and sleep together.” Several transport ships joined them, with news of what had transpired after their Actium departure. The battle had intensified and continued on for hours. Antony’s fleet had held out but was ultimately destroyed. For some time the surf delivered up bodies and timber, flecked—if a particularly colorful account can be believed—with the
purple and gold spangles
of the East. Antony’s land forces held firm. At the end of the meeting Antony attempted to distribute gifts to his men. From one of the transport ships, he handed around gold and silver treasures from Cleopatra’s palace. In tears, his men refused the prizes. Their commander showered them instead with affection. He would, he promised, arrange for them to be hidden away safely until they could agree on terms with Octavian. With Cleopatra he continued on across the Mediterranean, to the flat coast of Egypt. They made landfall in a desolate outpost in the northwestern corner of the country, where they separated, along an expanse of sandy beach.

Antony headed to Libya, where he had posted four legions. He planned to regroup. Cleopatra, her fleet lost, her treasure partly dispersed, her ally ruined, hurried to Alexandria. She had left Actium before anyone else, and in a powerful, well-equipped ship. If she moved rapidly she could outsail news of the fiasco. She knew what it was to return to Egypt under catastrophic conditions and took precautions: she ordered some quick floral arranging. When she glided past the lighthouse of Alexandria the following day she did so serenely, her ships garlanded with wreaths of flowers. Accompanied by flute players, an on-deck chorus chanted victory songs. To those who rowed out to meet her Cleopatra imparted the news of her extraordinary triumph, presumably without a trace of dryness in her throat. Nearly simultaneously, Antony’s nineteen legions and 12,000 cavalry—having finally given up hope that their commander would return to them, and after a week of stubborn negotiation—surrendered to Octavian, who was only just beginning to grasp the
scale of his victory
.

MISFORTUNE, WENT THE
saying
, has few friends; Cleopatra did not wait to discover if the adage was true. If her ruse had not already been discovered it was confirmed quickly enough now, in blood. The Alexandrian elite had disapproved of her before. She feared their reaction on learning of the Actium debacle; they could now fairly accuse her of having delivered Egypt to Rome.
She did not care to watch them
exult in her defeat. Nor did she care to be replaced on the throne. She no sooner returned than she embarked on an unbridled killing spree, ordering her most prominent detractors arrested and assassinated. From their estates she confiscated great sums. She appropriated additional monies wherever she could find them, seizing temple treasures. For whatever came next a fortune was required. It would be expensive to buy off the inevitable; in one form or another, Octavian would come calling. She equipped new forces and cast about for allies, whom she courted baldly. Artavasdes, the defiant Armenian king, had remained a prisoner in Alexandria, where his three years of captivity now came to an end. Cleopatra sent his severed head some 1,200 miles east, to his Median rival. She calculated that he would need no further encouragement to rise to her assistance. He demurred.

As in the past, she reached out to the East, where she had trade contacts
and longtime partisans, where Octavian was without traction, and where royalty was royalty. When Antony returned to Alexandria he found her consumed by
“a most bold and wonderful
enterprise.” An isthmus separated the Mediterranean from the Gulf of Suez, at the eastern frontier of Egypt. With a large force Cleopatra attempted to lift her ships out of the Mediterranean and haul them forty miles overland, to be relaunched via the gulf into the Red Sea. With her men and money she proposed to make a new home for herself, well beyond the borders of Egypt, possibly even in India, “far away from war and slavery.” In a blind alley it seemed Cleopatra’s nature to envision broad, unbounded horizons; the grandiosity and bravado were staggering, practically enough to suggest that she truly had contemplated an assault on the Roman world.

Cleopatra’s Red Sea venture was not impossible in a country that had for centuries hauled immense stone blocks across vast distances.
A monstrosity of a two-prowed Ptolemaic vessel
—it was said to have been nearly four hundred feet long and to sit sixty feet above the water—had centuries earlier been launched along wooden rollers, set at even intervals along a harborside ditch. Greased hides occasionally served the same purpose. Ships could be broken as well into sections. The enterprise was less feasible for a sovereign who had antagonized the tribe on the far side of the isthmus. Those happened to be
the Nabateans
, the shrewd, well-organized traders who had spent a year fighting Herod, thanks in part to Cleopatra’s sabotage. They did not need Herod—who had finally just defeated them—to remind them that Cleopatra was their common enemy. The Nabateans set fire to each of the Egyptian ships as it was drawn ashore. For Cleopatra the failure was particularly bitter. This was the corner of the world from which she had successfully relaunched herself in 48.

Herod was of course the obvious ally; in the desert, Octavian would be no match for their combined forces. To no one, however, was Cleopatra’s misfortune so profoundly satisfying. Cleopatra had dealt Herod a get-out-of-jail-free card in dismissing him from Actium; he lost no time in making his peace with Octavian. Probably in Rhodes that fall the
Judaean king made a great show of contrition. Dressed as a commoner, he removed his diadem as he set foot on shore. Before the new master of the Roman world he was frank and forthright. Indeed he had been loyal to Antony. Such, alas, was his nature. Integrity was his stock-in-trade. In his book, explained Herod, a friend ought to risk
“every bit of his soul
and body and substance.” Had he not been off assailing the Nabateans he would, he assured Octavian, be at Antony’s side even at that very moment. He abandoned his good friend of over two decades now only on account of that Egyptian woman, he admitted, proceeding to cough up the official version of Octavian’s war on Cleopatra. He had
told
Antony to do away with her. There is no indication of how Herod got through this speech with a straight face. At its end Octavian professed himself grateful to Cleopatra. She had, he reassured his caller, bequeathed him a fine ally. (Herod had reason to be doubly grateful to Cleopatra. He owed his crown to Roman fears of her in the first place.) Graciously, Octavian replaced the diadem on Herod’s head. He sent him off with Roman reinforcements. Meanwhile Cleopatra continued tirelessly to court neighboring tribes and friendly kings. She was able to mobilize only a troop of gladiators, highly skilled fighters who had been training for what were presumed to be Antony and Cleopatra’s victory celebrations. Answering her call, they headed south from what is today modern Turkey. Herod saw to it that they got no farther than Syria.

Failing the East, Cleopatra could look in the opposite direction. Rome had not fully conquered Spain, a restive region, hugely fertile and rich in silver mines. Even if the Mediterranean were closed to her, even if she were unable to continue the war against Octavian, she might sail west via the Indian Ocean, circumnavigating Africa. With her vast resources she and Antony might stir up Spain’s native tribes and found a new kingdom. It was not such a far-fetched idea; Cleopatra had before her the example of another linguistically gifted, charismatic leader. In 83 a rogue Roman proconsul had seized control of Spain, to the horror of his countrymen. Hailed by his native recruits as
“the new Hannibal
,” Sertorius had incited a revolt. He had very nearly gone on to establish an independent Roman
state.
^*
Cleopatra considered the prospect seriously; Octavian worried that she would manage to repeat Sertorius’s coup. A military operation at home was after all unlikely; with the defections of Herod and of Antony’s Cyrenean troops, Egypt was all that remained. It was firmly behind Cleopatra—in Upper Egypt her partisans offered to rise up on her behalf, an effort she discouraged—but unlikely to hold out long against Octavian. She had at best four hundred fiercely loyal Gaulish bodyguards, a modest number of troops, and a remnant of a fleet.

Nothing about the battle of Actium had been as brilliant as the blaze of invective that preceded it; most of the drama, and many of the casualties, came after the unspectacular fact. It was anticlimactic in the extreme, which could not be said of the months that followed in Alexandria. Yet again Cleopatra’s plans had miscarried. Yet again she cast about vigorously to ensure that all was not lost. All was a whirl of feverish activity at the palace; Plutarch has her not only looking to Spain and India but experimenting daily with deadly poisons. To one end or another she made a collection of these, testing them on prisoners and on venomous animals to determine which toxin yielded the most expeditious, least painful results. She was neither humbled nor panic-stricken but every bit as inventive as she had been when the first reverse of her life had landed her in the desert. The word “formidable” sooner or later attaches itself to Cleopatra and here it comes: she was formidable—spirited, disciplined, resourceful—in her retreat. There were no hints of despair. Two thousand years after the fact, you can still hear the fertile mind pulsing with ideas.

The same could not be said for Antony. He roamed restlessly about North Africa, mostly with two friends, a rhetorician and an especially clever, steadfast officer. Antony dismissed the rest of his entourage. The
relative solitude comforted him. He counted on marshaling reinforcements but in Cyrene discovered that his four legions had defected. Crushed, he attempted suicide. The two friends intervened, to deliver him to Alexandria. He arrived at the palace without the expected reinforcements, and, concedes Dio,
“without having accomplished anything.”
It was probably late in the fall, toward the end of the sowing season. Cleopatra was in the midst of her ill-fated Red Sea venture. She settled for fortifying the approaches to Egypt. She may also have contemplated
Octavian’s assassination
. For his part, Antony withdrew from the city and from society. He ordered a long causeway built into the Alexandrian harbor, at the end of which he fixed a
modest hut
, near the foot of the lighthouse. He declared himself an exile, a latter-day Timon of Athens,
“for he himself also had been wronged
and treated with ingratitude by his friends, and therefore hated and distrusted all mankind.”
Dio slips in a bitter note
of sympathy; he cannot help but marvel at the great number of people who—having received lavish honors and favors from Antony and Cleopatra—left them now in the lurch. Cleopatra appeared not to stumble over the injustice. Her understanding of gratitude may have been more realistic than Antony’s. She accepted the rude truths more easily than did he.